The digital revolution of the past few years has given rise to a number of devices which have made mixed signal processing easier if not simply possible. One of these devices is the delta sigma modulator or DSM. A DSM is usually used as the heart of a delta sigma converter—a device that makes it easy to combine high performance analog with digital processing by quickly converting digital signals to analog signal or vice versa. Delta sigma converters deliver high levels of precision when performing this conversion.
The DSM that is at the heart of delta sigma converters produces a bitstream representing the input signal level. In a generic feedback DSM, the bitstream output is generally merely the MSBs (most significant bits) from the quantizer as the LSBs (least significant bits) are fed back, through a suitable filter, to be subtracted from the input signal. Unfortunately, for high order noise shaping uses, the feedback filter could become quite large especially for a high number of LSBs being fed back as an error correction signal. Such a condition leads to more expensive delta sigma converters as more hardware is needed to implement such complex filters.
What is therefore required is a simpler delta sigma modulator which requires less hardware to implement but which also provides a good approximation of the performance of the more complex modulators. It is therefore an object of the present invention to mitigate if not overcome the shortcomings of the prior art.